5 Reasons Women Trail Men in Science

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Though women now receive half the doctorates in science and
engineering in the United States, they make up only 21 percent of
full science professors and a measly 5 percent of full
engineering professors.

This gender gap is the subject of hot debate, as illustrated in
2005, when then-Harvard president Larry Summers argued that
differences in science aptitude between men and women explained
most of the problem.

But research has found the root of the problem may be the clash
between
career and child-rearing, especially given that the long road
through graduate school, postdoctoral research positions at
universities and tenure-track professorship meanders through a
person's 20s and 30s, a time when a woman is disproportionately
more likely than a man to have childbearing and child care
responsibilities.

A new series of
articles in the journal Nature tackles these issues,
examining the causes of the science gender gap and highlighting
solutions that work.

"We are not drawing from our entire intellectual capital," Hannah
Valantine, the Stanford School of Medicine's dean of leadership
and diversity, told Nature. "We've got to put on the accelerator
to evoke social change."

Summers' claims about innate ability aside, women seem to have no
trouble meeting the rigorous demands of a Ph.D. The genders are
approximately equal in number of doctorates gained in the United
States. The problem, Nature's Helen Shen writes, is that women
drop out of the science pipeline more than men after getting that
Ph.D.

Shen cites one 2006 survey of chemistry doctoral students in the
United Kingdom that illustrates the pattern. In the first year of
their doctoral programs, 70 percent of the female students said
they planned a career in research. By year three, that number
dropped to 37 percent. Meanwhile, 59 percent of third-year men
still planned to become full-time researchers. [ The
10 Most Surprising Sex Statistics ]

The issue seems to involve work-life balance. Women in science
have fewer kids than their male colleagues, and have fewer
children than they'd like to have, according to a 2011 study in
the journal PLOS ONE.

Another analysis, published in the March/April issue of the
magazine
American Scientist, found that before having children, women
careers comparable to men in science. But the challenges of child
care and the demands of running a research lab are often seen as
incompatible. Women who plan to have children in the future drop
out of the academic research race at twice the rate of men, the
authors found.

Women are hit hard with
family responsibilities just when they need to meet research
goals to secure tenure, which is the right to not have one's job
terminated without cause. Most institutions provide only a
limited amount of time a professor can work without tenure,
meaning there is a great deal of pressure to achieve. Part-time
tenure-track positions could balance out the gender gap, the
American Scientist researchers suggest.

2. It's not just academia

The academic female brain drain might not seem so dire if those
women who left academia found cushier jobs in the private sector.
But those sorts of moves don't doesn't seem to be common.

Women do make up more than 25 percent of research scientists in
industry, according to Nature's Alison McCook, but they earn only
40 percent of the patents compared with men and start businesses
only half as often. Even worse are the numbers of women on
scientific advisory boards, which help steer the science of
biotech startups and other companies. Researchers from the
University of California, Berkeley, and the University of
Maryland have found that from the 1970s to today, the proportion
of women on scientific advisory boards has topped out at only
10.2 percent.

The tricky thing about discrimination is that it isn't always
intentional. Researchers use a task called the Implicit
Association Test to determine how unconsciously
biased a person is. In the case of women and science, people
might be asked to very quickly associate words like "woman" or
"wife" with terms like "astronomy" or "physics."

Across 34 countries, 70 percent of people are quicker to
associate male terms with science than female terms, according to
a study published in 2009 in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. This unconscious bias may suppress
the hiring of women in scientific careers, writes Stanford
University neurobiologist Jennifer Raymond in a Nature op-ed.

Indeed, culture plays a major role in girls' interest in science.
A 2009 study also published in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences found that the
lower the gender equality in a nation, the larger
the math aptitude gap between boys and girls, suggesting that
culture, not biology, is to blame. A 2012 study published in the
same journal found
biases against female scientists among science faculty
members.

It takes work to first acknowledge and then overcome these
biases, Raymond wrote. But conscious strategies such as
gender-blind hiring and efforts to mentor women can work, she
said.

"By enabling more women to succeed, despite the existence of
unconscious bias, this will gradually eliminate the stereotype of
the successful scientist as male, which is the root of gender
bias," she wrote. [ The
10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors ]

4. Quotas may not help

The European Commission, the governing body of the European
Union, has instituted quotas to try to even out the academic
gender gap in Europe, where only 18 percent of full professors
are female. For example, the commission is requiring 40 percent
of the members of the advisory boards for the EU's 2014-2020
research-funding program to be women.

But such quotas may harm more than they help, writes Isabelle
Vernos, a research professor at the Center for Genomic Regulation
in Spain. The European Research Council, a major funding agency,
has not found any increase in the number of research grants
offered to women when there are more women on advisory boards,
Vernos writes in Nature. Meanwhile, there are relatively few
female scientists, meaning that a small pool of women will face
even more
demands on their time by serving on the funding boards.

5. Some reforms are successful

The pitfalls of quotas don't mean institutions shouldn't act on
science gender gaps, however. Some programs do work, argue
Brigitte Mühlenbruch, president of the European Platform of Women
Scientists, and Maren Jochimsen of the University of
Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Gender-equality guidelines instituted
at the German Research Foundation that require transparency on
gender equality and use incentives to get there have worked by
supporting flexible working schedules,
child care facilities and unbiased hiring procedures,
Mühlenbruch and Jochimsen write in Nature.

Meanwhile, the European Science Foundation encourages
consideration in the funding process for researchers who have
taken time off for family reasons, they write. Germany has also
instituted a Program for Women Professors that funds universities
for promoting women to tenure-track positions. The program has
created 260 new female professorships since 2007. Muhlenbruch and
Jochimsen also see some benefit in quotas, they write.

"Motivation and participation are the basis of high-quality
results in research — not biased evaluation criteria, job
insecurity and glass ceilings," they write. "An academic culture
that is transparent, democratic and sensitive to gender and
diversity will benefit all scientists."